A FAT file system is a file system used by external storage apparatus of PC, such as a hard disk drive (HDD) and media using a solid state memory as a recording medium (Memory Stick (registered trademark) manufactured by Sony Corporation, SmartMedia (registered trademark) manufactured by Toshiba Corporation, CompactFlash (registered trademark) manufactured by SanDisk Inc. and MultiMediaCard, etc.).
The FAT file system uses a FAT (File Allocation Table) indicating that each file is located at which position of a recording medium, and two data: a file attribute and a directory item indicating that each file exists at which position of the directory.
An area dedicated to a FAT and a root directory is usually provided in a recording medium. A PC (Personal Computer) receives these information necessary for file access information.
A memory for constantly storing a copy of the contents of a FAT area in a storage medium is provided in a recording/reproducing apparatus. As a host apparatus issues an access request command, FAT stored in the memory is referenced to determine an access position so that high-speed access is possible (for example, refer to Patent Document 1 (Japanese Patent Application Publication HEI-8-339661)).
If a spinning recording medium such as HDD is used, a transfer rate in an inner area is much slower than that in an outer area (about a half for HDD). Although the FAT file system writes data continuously by using an (outer) area having a fast transfer rate as much as possible, after the outer area is used completely, the inner area with a slow rate has to be used by all means. If data write and erase are executed repetitively, it becomes difficult to acquire a continuous empty area, and one file is recorded divisionally into a number of non-continues clusters so that a transfer rate is lowered greatly (this is generally called fragmentation).
In either case, the transfer performance lowers as the time elapses. Particularly, if continuous imaging is performed in a high image quality mode of a digital still camera, data write of large-capacity at high-speed occurs in a short time and it is difficult to process this data write by using a presently used recording medium such as HDD and memory card. There arise therefore problems such as loading a large buffer in a camera and prolonging a wait time for writing again in a recording medium after continuous imaging.
The present invention has been made in order to solve these issues and aims to provide a recording/reproducing apparatus and a recording method, which are capable of writing a large-capacity file continuously at high-speed.